Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/742

722 than not to pretend. The conventional "fourteen weeks" in science gives no contact with nature, no training of any sort, no information worth having; only a distaste for that class of scattering information which is supposed to be science.

There is a charm in real knowledge which every student feels. The magnet attracts iron, to be sure, to the student who has learned the fact from a book, but the fact is real only to the student who has himself felt it pull. It is more than this, it is enchanting to the student who has discovered the fact for himself. To read a statement of the fact gives knowledge, more or less complete as the book is accurate or the memory retentive. To verify the fact gives training; to discover it gives inspiration. Training and inspiration, not the facts themselves, are the justification of science-teaching. Facts enough we can gather later in life when we are too old to be trained or inspired.

What is true of one science is true of all in greater or less degree; and I may take the science of zoölogy for my illustration simply because it is the one nearest my hand. In very few of our high schools has the instruction in zoölogy any real value. For this unfortunate fact there are several causes, and some of these are beyond the control of the teachers. In the first place, the high-school course is overloaded, and the small part of the course given to the sciences is divided among too many of them. A smattering of one science is of little value, either for discipline or information. A smattering of many sciences may be even worse, because it leads the mind to be content with smattering. Indeed, so greatly have our schools sinned in this respect that many writers on education seem to regard science as synonymous with smattering, and they contrast it with other branches of learning, which are supposed to have some standard of thoroughness. Most of our colleges have, at one time or other, arranged courses of study not approved by the faculty, in response to the popular demand for many studies in a little time. Such a course of odds and ends is always called "the scientific course," and it leads to the appropriate degree of "B. S."—Bachelor of Surfaces.

The high school can do some things very well, but it will fail if it tries to do too much. Unfortunately, the present tendency in our high schools is in the direction of such failure—to do many things poorly rather than a few things well. Each high school aims to give a general education; to be a university in a small way a university for the poor—a poor university. In the words of Lowell, "The public schools teach too little or too much; too little, if education is to go no further; too many things, if what is taught is taught thoroughly. And the more they seem to teach, the less likely is education to go further; for it is one of the weaknesses of democracy to be satisfied with the second best, if it